Most avid readers recall a story about a certain imaginative girl, a very late rabbit and a grinning Cheshire cat.
But not all children have access to an endowed library packed with classics such as Alice in Wonderland. Students in urban or remote rural areas where library books are scant may never get their hands on a copy of Lewis Carroll's well-known story.
A new project attempts to bridge this gap by developing a sweeping digital archive of books from around the world for children ages 3 to 13.
The International Children's Digital Library will launch Wednesday with over 200 books from 27 cultures in 15 languages -- the largest international collection of children's literature available online.
"Even in the U.S., there are many areas where kids don't see books in their own languages," said Allison Druin, an assistant education professor at the University of Maryland, who is also the principal investigator for the project.
"There are not a lot of digital libraries for children. You can find some books online, but there are very few for kids."
The prototype will include titles from national libraries, publishers, authors and illustrators, and materials freely available in the public domain. The collection will eventually host 10,000 books, from more than 100 countries.
"This is really fulfilling on the digital promise," said Jane White, the project's director. "There are places in outer Mongolia where you will see a computer connected to the Internet faster than you will ever see a great library or a great bookstore."
The Internet Archive and the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab built the collection to reflect the diversity and quality of children's literature.
Participating libraries include the Library of Congress, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Finnish Institute for Children's Literature, Helsinki University Library, Singapore National Library, Croatia National Library, Swiss Institute for Child and Youth Media, Swiss National Library, National Library of New Zealand and the University of Maryland's Prange Collection.
The National Science Foundation recently awarded a five-year research grant to fund the project -- the largest technology grant the NSF has awarded to a project for children.
One of the project's central challenges was designing an interface that children could use.
Most Web interfaces for children are "at best, frustrating," Druin said. Children who have trouble reading, typing and spelling often can't locate the books they want to read online.
"Kids know the types of books that they want, but they can't find them," she said.
The Human-Computer Interaction Lab worked with children ages 7 to 11 to find out how they look for books.
"I like looking for books that I am interested in, like books from Africa," said Vincent, who is 12 years old. "(The Internet) is easy and fun because you can push different buttons to turn pages."
Researchers found that kids search for books by color, shape and format. They also discovered that kids want to search for books according to how the stories make them feel -- happy, scared, funny or sad.
With this input, researchers developed a novel way for children to browse and search: The interface is entirely visual.
"It's unprecedented in its appropriateness of technology for children," Druin said.
"It's the first digital library for kids and made by kids with adults," said Alex, 11. "I like being able to read lots of books that you can't find in other libraries."
Visitors to the library can find books from or about a particular place by clicking on a picture of the globe. They can also search by categories such as genre, setting, fiction or nonfiction (true vs. make-believe), color, shape, language and rating. The site includes books in languages such as Arabic, Croatian, Maori, Samoan, Tongan and Vietnamese.
Children can look for a particular type of book, such as Spanish fairytales, by clicking on the genre and language categories. Once they click on a book cover, they can find out what the book is called, who wrote it, what language it's written in and what it's about.
Researchers also developed alternative readers so children can choose how they want to view a book. They can use a standard reader, a comic strip reader, a spiral reader or an Adobe eBook reader.
"Kids, depending on the book, want a different choice," Druin said.
The comic strip reader presents a zoomed-out view of thumbnail images of pages in horizontal strips. Children can quickly tell if a book has too many pictures or too many words. They can jump to a different page or zoom in for more detail.
The spiral reader shows the current page in the middle of the screen between two spirals. With this reader, a child can view all the pages in the book all at once.
"Usually I use the spiral book reader because it looks very cool and you can zoom into a page really fast," said 9-year-old Carl.
Unlike most digital collections, the library includes books that are both in and out of copyright. Readers can use the Adobe eBook reader to read copyrighted books in encrypted format.
Commercial publishers are using the project to test whether posting copyrighted books on the site will boost print sales. "We think that if you put the book up there, it will probably drive sales," White said.
The project's selection criteria will be posted on the Web so researchers can find out where a book came from, when it was scanned and who scanned it.
While some libraries did their own scanning, others sent books to the company in charge of digital imaging for the project, Octavo.
"This was never meant to be a preservation project," White said. "But it's turning out to be a preservation project. Scanning is a really, really big issue."
Despite technical challenges, the project is a resounding success so far -- among kids, at least.
"They think it's so cool," Druin said. "To them it's astounding."
